Mediaculture: Reflections on the effect of media and culture on our faith

Our lives, our religious lives, are lived in context. And that context for most of us is an American one. We should then pay attention to America’s religious experience and how that has affected our culture.

In October PBS aired God in America. (In case you missed it, it’s available for viewing online at pbs.org.) This six-hour series looks at 400 years of religious experience in what became the United States of America.

The series examines, according to its website, “how religious dissidents helped shape the American concept of religious liberty and the controversial evolution of that ideal in the nation’s courts and political arena; how religious freedom and waves of new immigrants and religious revivals fueled competition in the religious marketplace; how movements for social reform—from abolition to civil rights— galvanized men and women to put their faith into political action; and how religious faith influenced conflicts from the American Revolution to the Cold War.”

Narrated by Campbell Scott, the series uses documentary footage, historical dramatization and interviews with religious historians to present various religious movements in U.S. history.

The first episode, “A New Adam,” looks at how the New World challenged and changed the faiths the first European settlers brought with them, from Catholic missionaries preaching to Pueblo Indians in the Southwest to Puritan leaders such as John Winthrop in New England. It also considers the evangelical revivals inspired by the preaching of George Whitefield.

Episode two, “A New Eden,” considers the origins of America’s experiment in religious liberty and the unlikely alliance of evangelical Baptists and enlightenment figures such as Thomas Jefferson.

Episode three, “ANation Reborn,” explores how religion suffused the Civil War. It looks at the division over slavery and figures such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Episode four, “A New Light,” considers how the forces of modernity challenged traditional faith and drove a wedge between liberal and conservative believers. It talks about Bohemian immigrant Isaac Mayer Wise, who established Reform Judaism in America, and Presbyterian biblical scholar Charles Briggs, then discusses the 1925 Scopes trial about evolution.

Episode five, “Soul of a Nation,” explores the post-World War II era and evangelist Billy Graham, who tried to inspire a religious revival that fused faith with patriotism in a Cold War battle with “godless communism.” It also looks at Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.

Episode six, “Of God and Caesar,” discusses conservative evangelicals’ moral crusade over social issues like abortion and gay marriage and how their embrace of presidential politics ended in disappointment and questions about the mixing of religion and politics. It looks at how new waves of immigrants from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America have made the United States the most religiously diverse nation on earth.

Why take six hours of your time to look at America’s religious history? Because we learn from where we’ve been. And that history affects who we are as believers in the United States.

The series looks at how religious dissidents from Europe helped create our nation’s emphasis on liberty and independence. The religious diversity here is an outgrowth of America’s religious experience in the last 400 years. As we seek to be missional, we need to learn about our context.

Gordon Houser is associate editor of The Mennonite.